What Remains by Helene Dunbar Blog Tour: Review + Giveaway!

Hi everyone! I'm super stoked to be hosting today a stop on the blog tour of What Remains by Helene Dunbar. This book is so darn beautiful and deserves to be on the spotlight. ♥ Below you can find my review as well as a sweet tour-wide giveaway. Thanks so much for stopping by!

In less than a second...... two of the things Cal Ryan cares most about--a promising baseball career and Lizzie, one of his best friends--are gone forever.In the hours that follow......Cal's damaged heart is replaced. But his life will never be the same.Everyone expects him to pick up the pieces and move on.But Lizzie is gone, and all that remains for Cal is an overwhelming sense that her death was his fault. And a voice in his head that just...won't...stop.Cal thought he and his friends could overcome any obstacle. But grief might be the one exception.And that might take a lifetime to accept...

*The Reader's Review*

My rating: 5/5 stars

It's official. Helene Dunbar's books have become my go-to reads if I ever want to read something extraordinarily touching, heart-breaking and inspiring. Just like with the first book I read of her, These Gentle Wounds, What Remains came into my life to beautifully ruin my happy state of mind. It's been several days since I finished this book and I still cannot recover from it.There's no point of me explaining the book's plot since the summary does a good job of it, but I will tell you that even though I was "prepared" for Lizzie's death, it still affected me immensely. This surprised me since we don't get much time to for us to get attached to her character, yet I did. I felt for this character. Maybe because you can tell how much Cal and Spencer cared for her, how much they loved her, and maybe also because Lizzie was a broken and honestly brutal character that you wish had a better chance in life.Lizzie, Cal, and Spencer are the big stars of this book. I loved how unique and amazing they all were, and it pained me to see them suffer. Especially Cal, whose point of view is the one we get to read about. Cal's life changes dramatically after Lizzie's death and the emotional journey of recovering and accepting life as it is was no easy thing to read.I like to read authors acknowledgements because they sometimes give you an extra insight to the author's mind about their motivation to write this book, and I liked the small part where she sums up perfectly what this book is about. Helene Dunbar states that What Remains is ultimately a love story of friendship, and I 100% agree with that. There is a little bit of romance somewhere inside the book, but it's not as important as the relationship between these three friends, and I loved that.

"But I guess what remains after someone you love dies aren't things you can reach out and touch. When you love someone, that love changes you for better or worse. So in a way, maybe they're never truly gone."

This was my favorite quote from the book. It made me break into an embarrassing display of tears because it broke me and fixed me at the same time. So beautiful. Just like the whole book. The bottom line is: You HAVE to read What Remains. You won't regret it.

Meet the Author:

Helene Dunbar is the author of THESE GENTLE WOUNDS (Flux, 2014) and WHAT REMAINS (Flux, 2015). Over the years, she's worked as a drama critic, journalist, and marketing manager, and has written on topics as diverse as Irish music, court cases, theater, and Native American Indian tribes. She lives in Nashville with her husband and daughter, and exists on a steady diet of readers' tears.